Sherry Chandler » Rexroth on prosody
Rexroth on prosody
The brutal fact of the matter is that there simply does not exist even the vestige of a scientific approach to prosody. And it seems to be impossible to get any university to sponsor such research. …What little work has been done on poetry read aloud by sensitive, competent readers has revealed that the elements of speech that form the materials of the artist in words are far more complex than light and color, musical notes, or architectural, sculptural, and dance space, and that the prosodic analysis which we have inherited from the Greek grammarians of Alexandria and which they applied after the fact, often centuries after, had no real relevance to poetry in the English language and that the reading of poetry aloud by Englishmen and Americans differs drastically. Beyond those facts, which we knew already, we know practically nothing else.
— Kenneth Rexroth, American Poetry in the Twentieth Century (The Seabury Press, 1973)
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2 Comments
1. Harry replies at 23rd April 2007, 10:30 am :
“The brutal fact of the matter is that there simply does not exist even the vestige of a scientific approach to prosody.”
I wonder if he actually talked to any linguists before making that statement, or just to other poets and literary critics. It may well be exactly as he says, of course, but I do remember being struck at university, in discussions of literary theory, by how much talk there was about what language was and how it worked with absolutely no reference to any linguistics written in about the last 80 years.
2. sherry replies at 23rd April 2007, 11:04 am :
If I remember correctly, Harry, Timothy Steele, in All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing, has some nice stuff about the tonal values of different vowels, their length, how they’re made in the mouth. I read it with great interest but can’t say that I use it a lot in writing.
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